Samsung Dropping Apple Patent Lawsuits In Europe

Samsung has announced that it is dropping its patent lawsuits against Apple in Europe, Samsung was previously suing Apple for standards-essential patent infringement, in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France.

The guys over at The Verge spoke to Samsung about why they were dropping these European lawsuits, and received the following statement from Samsung.

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court. In this spirit, Samsung has decided to withdraw our injunction requests against Apple on the basis of our standard essential patents pending in European courts, in the interest of protecting consumer choice.”

Samsung were being investigated by the EU, on whether these patents should be licensed to Apple under the FRAND standard, we suspect that the EU investigation may have had something to do with Samsung deciding to drop the lawsuits.